Arthur : “You mean you can see into my mind ?”
Marvin: “Yes.”
Arthur: “And … ?”
Marvin: “It amazes me how you manage to live in anything that small”

Looking back down the recent posts you might notice that this is the 8th in a row about my new phone (so it’s obviously made something of an impression), this one brings the series to a close.

I’ve said already that I bought at 16GB memory card for the new phone which is a lot – I had 1GB before, so… what will I do with all that space? I’m not going to use it for video and 16GB is room for something like 250 hours of MP3s or 500 hours of WMAs: I own roughly 200 albums, so it’s a fair bet they’d fit. Photos – well maybe I’d keep a few hundred MB on the phone. In any event, I don’t want to fill the card completely. After a trip out with no card in the my camera I keep a SD-USB card adapter on my key-ring so I always have both a USB stick and a memory card : currently this uses my old micro-SD card in an full size SD adapter. If I need more than 1GB I can whip the card out of the phone, pop it in the adapter and keep shooting 

However the phone has a mass storage device mode so I thought to myself why not copy the Windows installation files to it, and see if I can boot a Machine off it and install Windows from the phone ? That way one could avoid carrying a lot of setup disks.
Here’s how I got on.

No. I’m not talking about sorting out the music for one’s funeral* …

I think every manager I have had in my 10 years at Microsoft has grumbled that I’m not great with planning – it’s a fair criticism and I try to work on it. When the subject comes up a quote from a book by William Gibson comes into my head.  “I try to plan in your sense of the word, but that isn't my basic mode, really. I improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans, you see.... Really, I've had to deal with givens.”  the speaker is actually an artificial intelligence, but I think that is how a lot of IT people work: improvise, deal with the situation at hand, then deal with the next situation. It may be what we prefer – but be it training plans or plans for rolling out new software you’ve got to do it.

We do try to help on the software side, by being both transparent and predictable. The rule for core things (like desktop and server operating systems) is at least 10 years of support. (Embedded operating systems have a different support model which runs for longer).
Mainstream support runs for 5 years from release OR until 2 years after the successor product releases whichever is later. Extended support runs for 5 years, or 2 years after the second successor product releases. After that those who can’t move forwards, but have deep pockets have the option on custom support. In order to be supported you have to be running a supported level of service pack, and I’ll cover that in a later post.

So let’s take a worked example.

  *  Windows 2000 professional’s General availability date was March 2000.

  *  The “n+1” release is Windows XP, which had a General availability date of December 2001.

  *  Two years after Windows XP would be December 2003 , less than the 5 year minimum so mainstream support for Windows 2000 runs to March 2005 when extended support begins. (In practice it got a mainstream June – products only go off the support list on particular days and they live on to the next one after the anniversary)

  *  The “n+2” release is Windows Vista with a General Availability date was Jan 2007.

  *  Two years Vista would be Jan 2009, again less than the 5 year minimum, so extended support support runs to June 2010. Again there is a few days extension.

So the cut off date for Windows 2000 professional is July 13th 2010. After that there will be custom support only for 2000 and if you are still running it you should understand that means we stop the routine distribution of security updates for it. 

As it happens the cut off dates for Windows 2000 Server mainstream support was 2 years after the release of Server 2003 – putting it in May 2005  -  so  2000 professional and server sync’d up. The 2 year point after Server 2008 and the 5 years of extended support take it to the same time, June 2010. So the cut off date for Windows 2000 Server is July 13th 2010.

I like to think that no-one reading this blog would still be running Windows 2000, but I know a good many are still running Windows XP. So let’s carve the dates on XPs tombstone:

5 years after XP’s GA date would be December 2006, but Vista had not shipped by then. So Mainstream support for XP ends two years after the GA date of Vista which takes us to Jan 2009 (In practice it was April 2009). Unless you have taken out a contract for extended support, you have only been getting security updates for XP since then.

5 Years after that is April 2014. Windows 7 had a GA date of October 2009, so 2 years on from there would be sooner. Extended support for XP ends on the later of the two dates, so April 2014.

For Vista, five years after GA will be later than 2 years after Windows 7, so Vista goes from mainstream to extended support in or shortly after January 2012. We’ve set the date, April 10th 2012. The end of extended support will depend on when the next version of Window ships, but it won’t be before April 11th 2017. Both dates for Windows 7 depend on future versions of Windows but won’t be sooner than January 13th 2015, and January 14th 2020. Put them in your diary now, with a reminder a long time in advance :-)

You can get all the dates from the Product lifecycle page

* Strange Angels by Laurie Anderson if you must know.

-

An update of the PowerShell library for Hyper-V has been posted to Codeplex.

This is the R2 version which takes advantage of PowerShell 2 which is available on R2 versions of Hyper-V server and Core installations of Windows Server. It will manage Hyper-V on the original release of Server 2008 provided it is running in a the V2 of PowerShell.

The original library allowed the creation and maintenance of VHD files, creating and deleing VMs, starting, stopping and saving them, managing their settings, taking and applying snapshots and configuration of the Hyper-V host. The following changes were made for the R2:

• Implemented as a PowerShell V2 module, rather an script to get started type Import-Module Hyperv (or add that to your PowerShell profile)
• Support for PowerShell on-line help (also new to V2). Get-Help command name works the same as it does for built-in commands
• Support for Powershell common parameters (again, new in PowerShell V2). You can now use –whatif and –confirm switches if you are uncertain what a command will do
• Greater flexibility for Piping the output of commands into other commands (previously some kinds of disk object could be piped, and some could not. This too leverages new stuff in PowerShell V2 See this blog post for more background). 
• Support for a menu front end (see Screen shots below)
• Language specific information has been moved to its own file, so the module can be localized easily.

In addition this “Gold” release adds support in two areas which were not in earlier R2 builds.

• Support for Clustering – on server 2008 R2 only, if the FailoverClusters Module has been loaded
• Support for PowerShell remoting [though this has had minimal testing to date]

There is a video showing the module in action on Technet Edge

There are now 122 functions, and 16 aliases for backwards compatibility so that any scripts written for V1 of the library should not break. V1 continues to be available for server 2008 customers who have not upgraded to PowerShell V2.  The RC has had a large number of downloads and very few bug reports (all of which have been fixed). The scope of changes between RC and this build meant it is designated as “Gold” rather than “Release”, it is expected that there minor errors in the on-line help, which will be properly proof read and corrected  before release is declared.

Feedback of all kinds is welcome (via codeplex or via this blog).

Top level menu. Note that Cluster networks for Live Migration and cluster shared volumes are displayed. [This allows the path to a CSV to be copied and pasted into the Create virtual machine part of the menu], and there is a menu Item to Live Migrate Virtual Machines.

VM menu, note that the cluster status of this machine shows as on-line. Machines can be moved between cluster nodes , or set as highly available. 

Disk management menu for a VM.

Earlier this week I went to “Oxford Geek Night” and the title of one of title of one of the sessions was “The Zombie Cookie apocalypse” delivered by David Sheldon (I wish his slides were on-line so you could read more and I could give him a proper credit), it wasn’t the only informative session – there were bunch of those -  but it was one which sent me away thinking “I should have known that”.

Here’s the Gist. We all know about cookies, the little bits of information which web sites send to to your browser to make applications work, or to follow you round the web. Even IE6 knew that cookies could be bad and could reject the tracking ones. Adobe Flash keeps its own cookies, which bypass the normal rules.
Although it doesn’t seem to widely known (I was in a roomful of people where internet expertise was the top skill, and no one seemed to have heard of this before) – it is reasonably well documented – often using Adobe’s name of “Local stored objects. You can read more information in Wikipedia’s dispassionate style, or you can have it in they’ll suck out your brains style if you prefer (of course you do !)

This has 3 main impacts.

1. If you run different browsers – say IE and Firefox (the demo I saw used Firefox and Chrome on Linux) each browser maintains (and can clear) its own Cookie store, so you can have different personas by using different browsers: but Flash is Flash wherever it runs so it uses a single store.
2. Browsers don’t know about information held by add-ins (Flash or anything else) so it can’t clear their information. You might think you’ve killed off the cookies but flash ones will keep coming back (hence the Zombie reference).
3. IE8 has “In Private Browsing”, so do Firefox and Chrome (I think chrome talks about Incognito Windows) .Adobe announced support for private modes recently, (you can read the IE team’s take on the this) but if you are running a version before 10.1 – and as I type this the current download is 10.0.45.2, so you are running something before 10.1 -  it uses the same store for browsing in Private that it uses for ordinary Browsing, and doesn’t clear cookies afterwards.

I thought “the handful of sites where I use In-Private Browsing aren’t flash sites.”, the flash handling the cookie is not always visible. When I did a quick search I found something from the Electronic Privacy Information Center which quotes one tracking platform vendor as saying "All advertisers, websites and networks use cookies for targeted advertising, but cookies are under attack. According to current research they are being erased by 40% of users creating serious problems.". Indeed: as EPIC puts a little later “By deleting cookies, consumers are clearly rejecting attempts to track them. Using an obscure technology to subvert these wishes is a practice that should be stopped”

So: How do you see, clear and block/allow Flash Cookies ? That announcement from Adobe suggests that in 10.1 you will be able to this by right clicking on flash in the browser and going to settings. Until you get 10.1, you have to visit a page on Adobe’s site –which isn’t espcially easy to find. 

Clearing the information from my computer I made a note of some of the sites which were leaving information on my PC which I was certain I hadn’t visited and got a little PowerShell script to get the title from their home page. (Which worked for most sites, some take a little fiddling). Here are the names and descriptions.

You can see what business they are all in. I’ve added them to my list of sites blocked by InPrivate Filtering. Which reminds me, I must post part 2 of that.

Over on the MSPress blog they have an announcement

Mitch Tulloch has updated his free ebook of last year. You can now download Understanding Microsoft Virtualization R2 Solutions in XPS format here and in PDF format here.

I’ve worked with Mitch on a couple of books, including the first release of this one, and seen a couple of others they’ve all been good (poor books from MS press are very few and far between). If this was a paper book which you had to pay for I’d suggest it is well worth looking at - but it’s a free download (print it or view it on screen : your choice) so, seriously, if you expect to be working  with Hyper-V in the foreseeable future you’d have to be daft not to download it.

Yesterday I wrote about end-of-life planning for OSes and so it makes sense to talk about the end of a service pack, as retirement – it is after all the word that is used on the product lifecycle pages. Of course we don’t mean retirement in go and live by the seaside sense…

Special police squads -- BLADE RUNNER UNITS -- had orders to shoot to kill, upon detection,any trespassing Replicants.

This was not called execution. It was called retirement

… that sense. Service packs, like OSes (and replicants) get an end date set well in advance, having explained OSes I want to move on to service packs (and if you want to know about Replicants you’ll have to look elsewhere).

The rule for service packs is simple. Two years after the release of a Service Pack we stop supporting the previous version. So although Windows Vista will be in mainstream support until 2012, and extended support until 2017, that doesn’t mean you can run the initial release , or Service Pack 1 and be supported until then. Lets use Vista as a worked example – I explained yesterday

Windows Vista [had] a General Availability date [of] Jan 2007.For Vista, five years after GA will be later than 2 years after Windows 7, so Vista goes from mainstream to extended support in or shortly after January 2012. We’ve set the date, April 10th 2012. The end of extended support will depend on when the next version of Window ships, but it won’t be before April 11th 2017.

Service pack 1 for Vista became available in April 2008, and Service Pack 2 became available in April 2009.
So, the life of the original Release to Manufacturing of (RTM) version of Windows Vista ends on April 14 2010.
In the same way the life of SP1 of Vista should end in April 2011, actually because we don’t retire things on the exact anniversary, SP1 gets an extension until July 12 2011.

If you are on Vista you must have upgraded to SP1 or SP2 (or Windows 7) by April 14 if you want to continue being supported.

So here’s the summary for what is supported with Vista, and when

Jan ‘07 – April ‘08  Only RTM release available

April ‘08 – April ‘09 RTM and Service Pack 1 supported

April ‘09 – April ‘10 RTM , Service Pack 1 and Service Pack 2 supported

April ‘10  - July ‘11 Service pack 1 and Service Pack 2 Supported

July ‘11 – April ‘12 Service Pack 2 only supported

April ‘12 – April ‘17 Extended support phase on SP2 only.

To simplify things, that assumes there is no Service pack 3 for Windows Vista, and that the successor to Windows 7 ships before April 11 2015.

Vista SP1 coincided with the release of Server 2008, and  Windows XP service pack 3 came very shortly afterwards. The extra few days means the anniversary for XP SP2 falls after the cut off date for April retirement and the end of life for XP SP 2 is July 13th 2010 (the same as day Windows 2000 professional and server editions). Mainstream support for Windows XP (all service packs) has ended,  after July 13 XP is extended support ONLY on SP3 ONLY.

I should have included in yesterdays post that July 13th 2010 also marks the end of mainstream support for Server 2003 (and Server 2003 R2), the  RTM and SP1 versions are already retired. It would be very unusual to see a new service pack for something in extended support. If you still have 2003 servers, you need to decide what you will do about support / upgrades before Jul 13th

Server 2008 shipped as SP1 to sync up with Windows Vista  and SP2 for both came out on the same date, so there are no server service pack actions required until July 12 2011. I explained yesterday why I have sympathy with people who don’t plan, but if you are on Server 2008 SP1 don’t leave it till the last minute to choose between SP2 or upgrading to R2  and then implementing your choice.

Update - Fixed a few typos. 

On the MDOP blog there is an announcement  of new releases of both APP-V (which runs applications in a Virtualized “bubble” so they don’t clash with each other) and MED-V (which runs a centrally managed virtualized OS)

• App-V 4.6 can be accessed immediately via MDOP 2010. Existing MDOP customers can download MDOP 2010 at the Microsoft Volume Licensing Site (MVLS).  For evaluation, MDOP 2010 can be downloaded from MSDN and TechNet.

• App-V 4.6 for RDS (formerly App-V for Terminal Services) is on the Microsoft.com/downloads site.

• MED-V 1.0 SP1 Release Candidate is available for immediate download and evaluation from  the Microsoft Connect site.

The major points App-V 4.6 is now compatible with 64-bit Windows client and server platforms, enabling IT to take advantage of x64 for client hardware refresh AND also deploy App-V to Windows Server 2008 R2 using remote desktop with scale advantages that come from 64 bit. The springboard site has a Q&A on App-V

MED-V adds support for Windows 7 (32bit and 64bit) – this is what large organizations should be using to deliver similar functionality to XP-Mode but with central management.

Bonus link:

On the Windows Team blog, Gavriella explains why this important to improving the Total Economic Impact – and Forrester have already published some very positive numbers on TEI for Windows 7

One of the things that seemed odd when I first came to Microsoft, was the way we put up posters for our own internal consumption. I’ve long since grown used to it: inevitably some of these are interesting, some are not, some are eye-catching and some are not. In the atrium of my building this week is a picture of a lifeboat and as a Scuba diver I have a bit of an interest in lifeboats, an organization I hope not to see when they are on duty but really want to be there. So a picture of one is bound to get my attention.

It turns out that the RNLI is one of the early customers using real world – sorry for being melodramatic – life and death applications on Windows Azure (the system handles man overboard alerts: email might seem like life and death at times, but getting this right is the difference between lives saved and lives lost.)  This is one of a set of posters around the place advertising the LiveOnAzure website using different case studies (you can go straight to the UK-Focused case studies themselves)

“Stuff in the cloud” is unknown territory for many people. There are those  run away with the idea and and start talking as if it means getting rid of all the IT in a business or the talk degenerates into  something like “Buzzword, Buzzword, cloud, Buzzword, utility, Buzzword, Buzzword, services Buzzword cloud cloud Buzzword, platform, Buzzword,pay as you go, Buzzword,Buzzword” …

… The LiveOnAzure site links to some great resources, including the 4  Minute video I’ve linked to here. If you want to cut through to quick understanding of what Azure is about, it’s 255 seconds well  spent, afterwards, if you’re interested, there is plenty more to study on the live on azure site.

OK cards on the table. I’m prejudiced. I don’t pretend to be anything else, and I try to open about my biases - flaunt them even. And Like most prejudiced people I can explain the logical roots that my prejudices spring from.

When it comes to browsers I think IE is pretty good .Actually let me qualify that: I thought IE 7  was when we got back to being pretty good and IE8 ups our game. Yes I know some organizations are stuck on the IE6 – I think being unable to move to current technology is a sign of badly run organization, so excuses for being stuck on 6 always sound lame to my ears. Usually it comes down to “We made a bad choice of something years ago and now we we can’t upgrade anything”. The investment to put this right which then makes people more productive, and reduces support costs etc is always a good one. When XP was still a current OS (early 2006) IE6 was looking old and tired and I tried Firefox and liked it. These days IE does what I want, so I haven’t felt the need to use the recent versions of Firefox, but to me it still embodies what is good in open source software development. I don’t hear its advocates talking open source ideology, and it strikes me that they want it to succeed on merit – the only way a competitor gets my respect. I can’t feel the same respect for Opera, since it was their complaint to the EU which nearly caused us to ship Windows 7 to Europe with no browser at all. Opera has a market share miles behind Firefox, (and well behind Chrome and Safari). If IE were to vanish it would seem a fair assumption that 3/4 of the total market would go to Firefox.  Prejudiced against Opera ? Guilty as charged m’lud.

So… It came a bit of disappointment to find that my new Windows Mobile device comes with Opera installed. Oh the irony: we can’t tell HTC and/or Orange what browser(s) should be on the device , even in our position as customer. On the first day I had the device, I hooked the device up to the corporate wireless (Windows Mobile Device Center handles getting the certificate that is needed) and configured the proxy for work networks. I pointed internet explorer at Www.getCoMo.com and downloaded Communicator Mobile which is working very nicely. Next I wanted to find some IP utilities to check what the network was doing. Sadly the beautiful photos on Bing’s home page are wasted on me - I don’t go to search pages (and my home page is set to blank) – I use the browser’s search box. Except Pocket IE doesn’t have one:  however there is a live search icon in the Programs folder but when I used that the result was an error in Opera. It seems Opera can’t connect through a proxy: it certainly doesn’t respect the global proxy setting which IE and Communicator used (it didn’t pick up my favourites either), and if there is somewhere to set, I can’t find it – it’s certainly not under settings. 

This produced an outburst which must have startled anyone who heard it. “Congenitally stupid” was one of the more repeatable phrases and I’ll draw a veil over the rest. Seriously. This phone is an evolved pocket PC, and I beta trialled the 802.1x drivers for the wireless LAN card which went in a jacket with my iPAQ 3600 series when Microsoft first started to use wireless LANs in 2001, and could use a proxy. It’s such a basic function I couldn’t believe it was missing.
IE at least will me set it as the default browser, so any attempt to jump to a URL at least goes there now. But, can I re-assign the short cut key on they keyboard to it ? That is beyond me. I can remove IE from a PC supplied with it (and presumably if the supplier replaces IE with something else , I can remove that,  and go to whatever I want) but there isn’t the same freedom of choice when you move away from the PC. [Unless there are hacks which the average phone user can’t find]

Over the next few weeks I’m going to be talking about IE8  (and depending on what gets announced at Mix maybe IE9 as well). Whilst I don’t have the data to prove it I’m convinced a lot of people running Firefox are doing so as a way of getting a modern browser when their company still has something from the last century tying them to IE6.  I suspect a lot of those people have seen demos which prove IE7 is much better than 6 and that IE8 is better, but the demos are always simplified, and you see pages with a single issue conveniently fixed using a click of a button. But it is definitely not that easy. You could have thousands of apps, many of them packaged, or you could be prevented from accessing the code because it is part of a product you bought.  

Why is that last bit in italics ? It’s part of the session abstract for a webcasts which is being run different times of day, over the next few weeks.

The presenter is Chris Jackson, Principal Consultant and the Technical Lead of the Windows Application Experience SWAT Team, Microsoft Corporation (a widely recognized expert in the field of Windows Application Compatibility) . Although I haven’t had a chance to watch it myself, I’ve seen the scores for the first run which said the audience rated it very highly. So if you still have IE6 in place and want to do something about it, this seems like a good place to start. 

Over on the Windows blog there is a post talking about the update we are about to send out which is designed to catch some of the tricks being used by large scale pirates against Windows 7.  There was a time were an update to this technology would have me reaching for my tin hat and flame-proof underwear but I came read a Post on the subject from Ed Bott who (as I’ve said before) can be assumed to know what he is talking about.

I was a fierce critic of the initial [Windows Genuine Advantage] efforts, primarily because the user experience was so awful and the tools it used were inaccurate. Back in 2008, I gave Microsoft a C+ for its efforts, a significant improvement over the “big fat F” it earned in 2006 and 2007.
Over the past year, I have been visiting the Windows Genuine forums at least once per quarter to survey performance and have found that activation issues have become a non-issue. In every example I have found, the problem could be traced to malware or a major hardware change, or (surprisingly often) to a customer who had unknowingly purchased counterfeit software. Where false positive reports were once a serious problem, they’re now practically nonexistent in my experience.

My experience backs this up. As a percentage the false positives were always small, but if you were affected it didn’t matter. And with an installed base as big as Windows a small percentage is a lot of people. There a story (which is widely told, but may be an urban legend)  of a major retailer whose repair operation always used the same key when reinstalling Windows: customers with licences hit problems later because their licences hadn’t been used and the one  which had was designated “pirated”. Those customers just had to enter their own product keys but the experience made many go ballistic. A repair shop wouldn’t do that today.

I keep thinking back to the theft of my laptop last year. I’ve had maybe a dozen laptops over the years and I haven’t really the same bond with them that I have with, say, my cameras. Even so whichever laptop I happen to have at the time goes everywhere with me like some kind of comfort blanket. It might be a business machine, but I do personal stuff on it. There’s business payoff to that that, the fact I am on-line and signed into Exchange and Office Communications Server when I’m editing photos (for example) means that colleagues from the other side of the world can get hold of me at all kinds of odd hours, but it’s my choice of hours.  Windows 7 is the first time that we have put Media Center into the Professional and Enterprise editions of the product, so now I have a machine which is both protected with Bitlocker (good for IT) and when I’m travelling I can take the USB TV receiver or programmes I’ve recorded on the Media Center at home.

With the new phone I thought I’d try taking a TV recording I’d made under Windows 7 and moving it over from the Sync panel in Windows Media player. This works, but with the downside that the video is resized down below the resolution of the screen and I went off round the following loop.

* Expansys can supply me with a Video cable for the phone
* I now have a 16GB memory card in the phone. [This was a special offer from Expansys, £30.47 including taxes shipping etc –my memory of prices gone by makes this seem so cheap. How much cheaper will memory be in a year or two.]
* If I convert my TV recordings to 480p resolution WMV I can then play these from the phone to a TV or whatever

Then I came to a stop because:

(a) The 480p / 30 Frames per second video that came out of Movie maker was too much for the phone (it might be speed of reading from the card or CPU/Graphics chip might not be up to the job, it might work better with a different codec)
(b) I’m probably going to have to power the phone because this will chomp through the battery at quite a speed. Where will the power supply be ? In the bag with my laptop, along with the video cable.  – or more likely if I’m travelling I will charge the phone from the laptop.

In short the phone is a nice music player but it is best suited to playing low-res video. If I’m anywhere that I can use a big screen I’ll have my laptop. Since Windows 7 gives me media centre why would I waste time with the other stuff ? 

Just on music front, I’m expecting to have a combined USB / Jack plug connection box in my car soon, it can play MP3 files via USB or anything the phone can output (via another connection adapter) to a jack plug. I have put voice command 1.6 on the phone so I can control Windows Media player by tapping my bluetooth earpiece and saying “Play artist/Album/whatever” – which is always a fun trick when the phone is in one room and you are in another. In the days when 512MB was a big storage card it made a lot of sense to use WMA files as used less space than Mp3 for the same quality. But depending how well the MP3 side of the adapter integrates with the existing stereo controls I want to use the phone’s ability to go into “Mass storage class” mode and act like a USB stick, which which will mean transcoding (or re-ripping) music to play in the car. I’ll be spending enough time doing that to not want to bother doing the same for video. Heck, I still have a decent pile of vinyl albums I keep saying I will digitize and haven’t got round to.

Dave Heiner, one of our Vice Presidents and our Deputy General Counsel has posted an explanation of exactly what will be happening.

I would expect something in due course to explain how organizations can prevent their users being presented with the choice screen (if you are using WSUS – and you should be – you should be able to choose not distribute that update. If you are distributing images apply the update and make your browser choice before creating the image, etc.) .

I’m getting on reasonably well with my new HTC Touch Pro2, and Windows Mobile 6.5 (a.k.a Windows Phone). There are places where it has adapted well to being operated as a touch device – chunky menus and big buttons are essential – the 480 pixel wide screen is as wide 3 of my fingers which puts about 20,000 pixels under my thumb –so big targets are good if you read my post about radio I was operating the device with gloves on On the other had there are some things which work better with a stylus. I still find myself occasionally caught in two minds whether to unholster the stylus or not.  Some of the older applications (3rd party ones or things like solitaire, which doesn’t feel like it has changed in the decade since I first saw it on a pocket PC) need the stylus. [This post from Mary Jo suggests that may change: I don’t know if what upgrade(s) will come to this phone in the future] .

A case in point (pun intended) for apps that need the stylus is remote desktop , and I’ve had a couple of instances where the easiest way to get something from my home (Vista) PC was by remoting into it. Remote desktop maps storage through – just like it does on a fully fledged PC. I’ll grant that the Pocket keyboard and screen aren’t ideal for a fully fledged VDI solution – indeed before I tried it I thought remote desktop on a 3.6 inch 800x480 screen would fit Dr Johnson’s quote, “like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." Still as you can see, as a way of doing a quick check on or file transfer it works. In the first window you can see me checking on media center (you can tell this is the old machine – I wrote Back here about "My channel Logos” for Windows 7, which has prettied this up for my laptop)  and in the second to copy a file I needed without needing to install the Mobile bits on the home machine first.

I don’t often paste things from senior Microsoft folks into my blog, but I’d like to quote some things from our managing director here in the UK, Gordon Frazer

February 9^th marks Safer Internet Day, a vital drive to promote a safer internet for all users, especially young people.

For the second year in a row, Microsoft subsidiaries across Europe are organizing employee volunteering activities for Safer Internet Day 2010. Through local partnerships with NGOs, schools, customers and partners, around 650 Microsoft employees in 24 subsidiaries will train more than 50,000 people on online safety. Last year Microsoft UK educated 12,000 young people and 2000 parents in online safety

Through an accident of scheduling I’m going to be using one of the volunteering days Microsoft gives me today, but for a different cause.  Volunteering days are one of the distinct pluses about working at Microsoft and its great to see colleagues supporting things like this. I’ve also maintained for a long time when a company is Microsoft’s size it brings some responsibilities with it, and the protection of children has been an area we have concentrated on since before I joined the company 10 years ago.

We are part of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety (UKCCIS) and Gordon’s mail also said This year as part of the “Click Clever Click Safe” campaign UKCCIS will be launching a new digital safety code for children– “Zip It, Block It, Flag It”.  Over 100 Microsoft volunteers will be out in schools in the UK teaching young people and parents alike about child online safety and helping build public awareness for simple safety tips.

Our volunteering activities today mark our strong commitment to child online safety. Online safety is not only core to our business, as exemplified by particular features in Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) and our work in developing the Microsoft Child Exploitation Tracking System (CETS) which helps law enforcement officials collaborate and share information with other police services to manage child protection cases, but it is also an issue that our employees, many parents themselves, take very seriously. As a company we put a great deal of faith in our technology, however, we are also aware that the tools we provide have to be used responsibly. 

Indeed. I said in something else I was writing that there is an old phrase describing user issues  “PEBCAK  Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard”, and technology – however good – is no substitute for user education. We have a page of advice which you might find obvious but could be helpful to share with  friends and family that have children active online http://www.microsoft.com/uk/citizenship/safeandsecure/parentadvice/default.mspx

IE8 provides the best protection out there, and the Child Exploitation and On-line Protection Centre (CEOP) have launched their own branded version of it which provides ease of reporting access for young people www.ceop.gov.uk/ie8, which again may be worth installing at home if you have children or passing on to Friends and Family who are running older versions of IE.